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The NHSB Schism
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Business New Haven
9/15/2003
By: BNH
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The dispute over New Haven Savings Bank’s decision to convert from a mutual to a stock bank marks a clear break between City Hall and what remains of the city’s presumptive "corporate leadership."
New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. has been a vigorous and articulate opponent of the change, which he characterized at a September 5 press conference as a "bank robbery." The event was a hastily organized affair after DeStefano learned that NHSB had called a meeting of bank corporators to vote on the conversion on the very next business day, Monday, September 8.
It hardly hurt the bank that DeStefano’s Friday press conference was reported on in the Saturday New Haven Register - the least-read paper of the week.
Meanwhile, the bank’s management was able to place an op-ed signed by 11 corporators in the Sunday Register, which has the highest readership of the week. Register Publisher Kevin F. Walsh is an NHSB corporator. (We invite you to draw your own conclusions.)
Signatories to the September 7 op-ed included United Illuminating Chairman Nathaniel D. Woodson, past UI chairman Richard J. Grossi, Bilco Co. President Robert Lyons, Albertus Magnus President Julia McNamara and Yale-New Haven Hospital President Joseph A. Zaccagnino - all bank corporators.
There was a time not very long ago that big-company honchos like Woodson and Zaccagnino marched in lockstep with the mayor on most issues overlapping the corporate and political arenas. The schism over NHSB’s future bodes ill for a community trying to generate and sustain positive commercial momentum in the face of a shrinking corporate base.
NHSB management’s refusal to permit DeStefano to address its corporators before their critical vote is more than an insult to the mayor - it is an expression of arrogance unlike any other seen in these parts for a long time.
The most telling vignette of the week was the bank’s last-minute decision to move the corporators’ meeting from the New Haven Lawn Club to Grassy Hill Country Club in Orange to elude a reported group of 200 bank depositors, the media - and DeStefano himself. The mayor in fact drove to Orange in an attempt to speak to the group before its vote, but was turned away by a security guard as though he were some garden-variety undesirable.
If the New Haven business community has a Hall of Shame, we have a pretty good idea of who ought to be in it.
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